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  • Lvxferre [he/him]English
    79·
    1 个月前

    Shameless plug to !linguistics@mander.xyz . This sort of question is welcome there.

    Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:

    • if you were born in Roma, you’d be romanus (“Roman”)
    • if you were born in Eboracum (modern York), you’d be eboracensis (“Yorkese”)
    • if you were born in Gallia (roughly modern Belgium and France), you’d be gallicus (“Gallic”)

    In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:

    • that -anus was originally just -nus. Inherited from Proto-Indo-European *-nós; you’d plop it after verbs to form adjectives.
    • that -icus was originally just -cus; from PIE *-kos, but you’d plop it into nouns instead.
    • nobody really knows where -ensis is from but some claim that Latin borrowed it from Etruscan.

    Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and… left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn’t enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.

    And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔

    There’s some awareness among English speakers that “[$adjective]istan” means roughly “country where the [$adjective] people live”, so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.

    That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.

    In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It’s from the root *steh₂- “to stand”, and also a cognate of “to stand”. So etymologically “[$adjective]istan” is roughly “where the [$adjective] people stand”. (inb4 I’m simplifying it.)

    Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain…

    Note that India doesn’t simply have different “languages”; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.

    That said:

    • “India” ultimately backtracks to Greek Ἰνδός / Indós, the river Indus; and Greek borrowed it from Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢𐏁 / Hindūš. That ending changed because it’s what Greek does.
    • “Hindi” comes from Hindi हिंदी / hindī, that comes from Classical Persian هِنْدِی / hindī. That hind- is the same as in the above, referring to the lands around the Indus (India), and the -ī is “related to”.

    Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don’t do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as “India”, showing no aspiration.

    Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the “Ph” and decided to use an “F”? 🤔

    So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there’s that convention that royalty names are translated, so “Felipe II” ended as “Philip II” in English. And so the “Islas Filipinas” ended as “Philippine Islands”.

    …but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.

    Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego… just no -ish).

    Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn’t enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia “Galicia” → galego “Galician”) and -co (see: Áustria “Austria” → austríaco “Austrian”).

    Then there’s cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it’s dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).

    Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it’s the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.

    There’s also the weird case of “brasileiro” (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
    321·
    1 年前

    (Shameless self-promotion: if you like this subject, consider !linguistics@mander.xyz )

    It’s being used as an adversative conjunction, connecting a phrase (usually a clause) with whatever precedes it, in a way that highlights that the precedent would incorrectly imply something. Here’s a set of examples showing it:

    1. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. But it’s used at the end of the sentence.”
    2. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence tho.”
    3. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence.”

    #1 and #2 are equivalent: the first sentence introduces an information (that “tho” is like a “but”), that information implies something incorrect (if “tho” is like a “but”, it goes at the start of the sentence, right?), and the second sentence contradicts said implication (nope, “tho” goes at the end). With the “but” or the “tho”, that contradiction is explicit.

    Now look at #3 - it sounds like [incorrectly] saying that “but” goes at the end of the sentence, unlike #1 or #2.

    A conjunction going after the elements being “conjoined” might sound a bit weird, but it’s nothing new, or English exclusive. Latin for example used -que (additive conjunction; “and”) this way: first you list the items being conjoined, then plop a -que at the end. (Classical examples: “arma uirumque cano” [I sing the arms and men] and “Senatus Populusque Romanus” [Roman Senate and People]).

    Now, on why it’s being used this way: there’s the spelling and the increased usage.

    “Tho” as a short form for “though” is old; Merrian-Webster claims that it was already uncommonly used in the 18xx. It’s just that, nowadays, it became more socially accepted in informal writing, due to increased usage. This sort of “grammatical word” (conjunctions, articles, adpositions, copula verb etc.) tends to be rather small, both phonetically and spelling-wise.

    And the usage of “though” as an adversative conjunction is attested from the 12th century. Probably even older since cognates in other Germanic languages also have the adversative meaning.

    I’m not sure on what I’m going to say next, but I think that the increased modern usage is the result of some changes on how people interpret “but”. Some have been treating it as if it contradicted everything said before, like:

    • Alice: “I wanted a banana pie. Not an apple pie.”
    • Bob: “Why do you hate apples?”
    • Alice: “I like apples, but I like bananas better.”
    • Bob [who stopped hearing at the “but”]: “THAN U DUN LIEK APPLES!”

    That probably led to increased usage of “though” because it’s used after whatever you said the relevant piece of info. So it’s basically a way to cut short an assumption before it even happens.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]English
    20·
    7 个月前

    [Shameless advertisement: we have a linguistics community, !linguistics@mander.xyz . I’m the mod there; I apologise for the relative lack of activity nowadays, but everyone is welcome to post this sort of stuff there.]

    What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.

    I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
    14·
    9 个月前

    For historical questions concerning language, feel free to use !linguistics@mander.xyz. It’s by no means a big or well-organised comm, but given that the mod there (me) has a hard-on for Historical Linguistics, you’d get at least some answer.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
    13·
    1 年前

    [shameless ad] This sort of question fits well !linguistics@mander.xyz [/shameless ad]

    What causes the loss of a local variety (dialect or language) is not simply exposure to other varieties, but the loss of the identity associated with said variety. In other words, what led to the blending and death of those dialects wasn’t the audio communication technology - it’s economical, social, and ideological pressures, such as nationalism.

    I’ll exemplify this using rhoticity in England. If telephone, radio and TV led to blending and death of dialects, you’d expect rhoticity in England to increase, due to exposure to American media. It didn’t - it’s decreasing:


    Source for the map: it’s a collation of both maps in this article. The reason for the shift however becomes obvious when you look at identity matters: “you’re a Brit, speak like a Brit”.

    The exact same reasoning applies to other languages, by the way. Caipira Portuguese features aren’t being replaced with the ones from that weird Globo TV accent, but with the ones spoken in São Paulo city; sheísmo in Argentina seems to be spreading, regardless of media from other countries; Occitan was not killed in France by simply exposing kids to French, but by making them feel ashamed of speaking Occitan.

    With that out of the way, it’s hard to predict the future impact of machine text generation, be it through LLMs or better models. It’s perfectly possible that this sort of tech helps the preservation of local varieties, as LLMs are kind of good at translation; for example, I’ve noticed that Gemini is able to parse Venetian, even if unable to answer in the language.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]English
    9·
    1 年前

    Even then, you can still move the community to another instance. You won’t get the same address, but provided that the community wants to leave, it will. (In fact I’m doing this right now, migrating !linguistics@lemmy.ml into !linguistics@mander.xyz )

    That’s because the community is not just some address on the URL bar. It’s the users and the content that they share with each other. It’ll be where the users are.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
    3·
    2 个月前

    Let’s see:

    • “You’re being pushy” is one of them indeed. I might not be the first one contacting them to talk about this.
    • Assuming that I want to merge !linguistics@mander.xyz with their community. I definitively don’t, but the expectation itself could create unnecessary conflict.
    • Assuming that I’m only shilling the Fediverse, with no regards to the well-being of their communities, when it’s both.
    • Assuming that I have further, hidden motivations.

    …and so goes on. Plus much like PugJesus I get anxious thinking “this is an unforgivable interruption of someone else’s life”,.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]
    3·
    2 个月前

    As in, the Italo-Western Romance language?

    Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There’s also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).

    Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called “Talian”, and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.

    When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages

    There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn’t be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.

    Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).

    That said the “bulk” of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.

    What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?

    Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a “belt” between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.

    Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.

    See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.

    There’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I’m one of the mods there.]

    That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, being !anime@lemmy.ml. (I wasn’t a mod there but I’m a weeb so…)

    Now thinking, if I didn’t do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]English
    3·
    2 个月前

    It’s another outlet for the same research that I’ve posted in !linguistics@mander.xyz, so I’ll summarise it here.

    There’s an archaeological culture called Yamnaya, dated from ~3000 BCE, found in the following region:

    I’ll call that region “the steppes” here. To simplify it, the genetic pool of the people behind that culture is found all across Europe, Iran and northern India, in a way that you’d automatically associate it with Proto-Indo-European speakers, as the distribution seems to fit rather well the distribution of IE languages in Eurasia.

    Well, there’s a problem with this Yamnaya = PIE speakers association. See, in central Anatolia there were also a bunch of Indo-European languages, nowadays extinct: Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, etc. They’re called the “Anatolian” languages. (No, linguists are not a creative bunch.) If this association between the Yamnaya culture and PIE is correct, you’d expect to see at least some really old Yamnaya ancestry in that region, predating any Greek/Roman invasion… and you don’t. At least, not in meaningful amounts. Why is that?

    Now let’s look at the article. They identified another group, that they’re calling the Caucasus Lower Volga (CLV). That group seems to have mixed with another group, generating the people behind the Yamnaya culture; and to have also migrated to central Anatolia.

    But wait, which is the PIE speakers group then - the CLV or Yamnaya? Well… both. See, linguists have for a long time claimed that what we call “Proto-Indo-European” is at least two languages:

    • Late PIE - ancestor of the modern Indo-European languages. Russian? Hindi? English? Italian? Albanese? Greek? Yes.
    • Early PIE - ancestor of both Late PIE and the Anatolian languages.

    That is mostly based on information that we have about Hittite, that seems to have diverged from other Indo-European languages early. For example, it conserves a bunch of really archaic features, such as a simple animate vs. inanimate gender system (Late PIE likely had a masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter gender system instead), and sounds only predicted to have existed in PIE (the “laryngeals”) before Hittite was discovered.

    What’s more is that there was always some dispute on where Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken: Anatolia (near Hittite), the steppes (Yamnaya) or the Caucasus. Accordingly to this study, Early PIE was spoken near the Caucasus, and Late PIE in the steppes.

    Personally I think that, while this is not outright revolutionary, it’ll have a big impact for Historical Linguistics.

    For a start, it pretty much forces us to handle Early PIE and Late PIE separately; we need separated reconstructions for them. And we probably should stop calling them this way, and instead pick other names (like Proto-Indo-Celtic and Proto-Indo-Anatolian), or something like that.

    Another matter is that, the more you try to fix PIE reconstruction oddities, the more it resembles the Northwest Caucasian languages - languages known for having a bazillion consonants, 2~3 vowels, and a mostly agglutinative grammar. Perhaps we should be looking more at Adyghe and its siblings when reconstructing Early PIE = Proto-Indo-Anatolian, for potential areal features.

    A third matter are the laryngeals and the odd T D Dʰ stop system. Treating the laryngeals as consonants in Early PIE seems sensible; but in Late PIE, perhaps we should be treating them as ultrashort vowels instead; most descendants would get rid of them, and Greek would merge them into the short vowels. And it’s perfectly possible that Late PIE already had a Tʰ T D Dʰ system, like the one attested for Sanskrit.